Street Food, Yemeni Style

Like most of the food I enjoyed while in Yemen, fahsa remains a mystery to me: the harder it is to distinguish the components of the finished dish, the tastier it will be.

Fahsa is principally a lamb stew, braised with spices in a giant vat and then finished in a super-heated stone pot. The secret ingredient is fenugreek, a stalky herb that has become a popular supplement among nursing mothers, due to claims that it has breast-milk-enhancing properties. Fahsa is finished with an airy green sauce, a frothy leek-cilantro mixture—an ancient precursor to the “culinary foams” whipped up by the likes of Ferran Adria.

I ate the fahsa with a couple of Yemeni friends, sitting at a table outdoors. We dipped pieces of flatbread into shared stone pots, pausing only to pour in extra broth brought by a waiter. Soon the table was a mess of breadcrumbs, splashes of broth, and bits of lamb. It tasted phenomenal, a rich salty-sweetness that one expects only in dishes that contain sausage.

Inside the fahsa joint, men crowded around low, communal tables in a large room that doubled as the kitchen. A frenzy of waiters ran across counters as if they were catwalks, throwing around scalding stone pots. The chefs peered into vats and fry pans, over massive gas burners. Most food I ate in Yemen was prepared in restaurants that specialize in a single dish, cooked rapidly over a fire so powerful that the roar of the gas made it impossible to hear anything else.

A meal at one of these establishments is a sprint. One day, I ate half a roasted chicken, its skin crisped with a chili-spice mixture, and a plate of saffron rice in less than ten minutes—and none of the people who were eating when I arrived were still around when I paid and left. Later, at dinner, I watched through an arched brick window as a chef cooked fassoulia, a stir-fried bean dish with chopped tomatoes, green onions, and chili peppers, in about forty-five seconds.

It was perhaps the most delicious thing I ate in Yemen, despite having all the visual appeal of canned cat food.

Some places seem designed to accommodate this pace. An extraordinarily old man makes sweet chai with hot milk in a tiny shop next to the Pink Mosque in the Old City. He serves one and a half glasses of tea with every order. The half-full one cools more quickly, so you start with that and, by the time you are done, the full glass will be ready to drink.

Street food is almost a misnomer in Sanaa, the capital, because it implies the existence of a separate class of dining, with hidden kitchens and tablecloths, and a bowl of mints by the register. The closest I found was at the souk al samek—the fish market, which is little more than a parking lot filled with trucks from the Red Sea coast town of Hodeida. At the souk, you pick out a whole fish or maybe some fresh shrimp (a kilo goes for two thousand riyals, or about ten dollars), and then carry it across the street to a restaurant. There, you hand it to a waiter and order some flatbread and drinks. And then you wait. It was worth it.